At the end of August, a meeting of Muslim clerics and scholars
convened in the Chechen capital of Grozny to forge a consensus on the
subject of ‘who constitutes a Sunni.’

Sunnism, the 200 or so Sunni clerics from Egypt, South Africa, India, Europe, Turkey, Jordan, Yemen, Russia warned, “has
undergone a dangerous deformation in the wake of efforts by extremists
to void its sense in order to take it over and reduce it to their
perception.”
The Muslim world is currently under a siege of
terror, led by a deviant strain that claims religious authority and
kills in the name of Islam.

So the Grozny participants had gathered, by
invitation of the Chechen president, to make “a radical change in order to re-establish the true meaning of Sunnism.”

If
their final communique was any indicator, the group of distinguished
scholars had a very particular message for the Muslim world: Wahhabism -
and its associated takfirism - are no longer welcome within the Sunni
fold.

Specifically, the conference’s closing statement says this: “Ash’arites
and the Maturidi are the people of Sunnism and those who belong to the
Sunni community, both at the level of the doctrine and of the four
schools of Sunni jurisprudence (Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi’i, Maliki), as
well as Sufis, both in terms of knowledge and moral ethics."In
one fell swoop, Wahhabism, the official state religion of only two
Muslim countries -Saudi Arabia and Qatar - was not part of the majority
Muslim agenda any longer.

The backlash from the Saudis came hard and fast, honing in on the
participation of Egypt’s Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb of Al Azhar, the
foremost center for Sunni theological study in the Islamic world.

Saudi
Arabia has, after all, subsidized the flailing Egyptian economy to the
tune of billions of dollars in the past few years, alongside its Wahhabi
neighbor Qatar, which has in turn bank-rolled the Muslim Brotherhood – a
group also excluded from the Grozny meeting.

While Tayeb did not
single out the Saudis in his conference speech, his elevated position in
the global Sunni hierarchy lent a great deal of weight to the
proceedings. And Al Azhar’s prominence in the Sunni world is rivaled
only by the relatively new role of the Al Saud monarch as the custodian
of the two holy sites, Mecca and Medina.

Just last year – in Mecca, no less - Tayeb slammed
extremist trends during a speech on terrorism, lashing out at “corrupt
interpretations” of religious texts and appealing to believers “to tackle in our schools and universities this tendency to accuse Muslims of being unbelievers.”It is Wahhabism that is most often accused of sponsoring this trend globally.

The
radical sect, borne in the 18th century, deviates from traditional Sunni
doctrine in various ways, most notably sanctioning violence against
nonbelievers - including Muslims who reject Wahhabi interpretation
(takfirism).

Saudi Arabia is the single largest state contributor
to tens of thousands of Wahhabi-influenced mosques, schools, clerics and
Islamic publications scattered throughout the Muslim world – many of
them, today, feeders for terrorist recruitment. By some accounts that figure has reached almost $100 billion in the last three decades or so.

In Grozny, conference participants made reference to this dangerous trend, and called for a “return to the schools of great knowledge" outside Saudi Arabia – in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen.

Saudi
officialdom took to social media to express their outrage. Saudi royal,
Prince Khalid al-Saud, warned that the event represented “a conspiracy that openly targets our country and it's religious standing, specifically.” Hmmm..........Could be a good start. Read the full story here.

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Amanullah Khan - King of Afghanistan (1919-1929).

The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, head of Al-Azhar, the highest seat of learning in the Sunni world.“The niqab is a tradition and has nothing to do with Islam,” said Sheikh Tantawi, vowing to ban it in Al-Azhar schools.After the girl complied he insisted she should not wear it any more.“I tell you again that the niqab has nothing to do with Islam and it is only a mere custom. I understand the religion better than you and your parents.” The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar imam vowed to issue a ban against the face-veil in all schools linked to Al-Azhar.“Source

The Jewish Holocaust.

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